Understanding Health and Energy in Civilization: Beyond Earth

Understanding Health and Energy in Civilization: Beyond Earth

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Civilization: Beyond Earth introduces modern factors into the mix in the form of Health and Energy, while the two still existed in the previous games with somewhat different appellations (but similar applications), they add certain features into CivBE that can be overlooked by players going into the game for the first time.

Civilization: Beyond Earth Health and Energy

Health and Energy are one of the most important ‘resources’ in CivBE, and often the first to lead to a failed civilization if no managed probably.

Health

Health in Civilization: Beyond Earth works differently from Happiness in its predecessor. For those who played the previous Civilization games, you should be aware that local buildings and improvements in a city will provide localized health.

The amount of health that a city can produce is dependent on its population. While this may the underlying base for Health, there are many more factors associated with this feature of the game.

Health is in its most simple form a limiting factor to the growth of your nation. Health has different tiers or levels associated with it, and each tier has its own bonus or penalty.

Note that Health can also go in negative values, in which case penalties gradually accumulate.

Variation of Health
Health generally decreases when you have more citizens and more cities. These cities are using up a certain amount of available health, so before you are about to found new outputs, it is important to check the status of your health and decide accordingly.

If you want to know exactly about your Colony’s current health, you can highlight the Health icon on top of the screen. If it is in red, it means your Health is going in negative values for that territory.

Green means it has a positive value. It will also give you a breakdown of the bonuses and penalties, along with the influences that are adding or subtracting to your total Health value.

Health is going to be a troublesome factor for those who love to conquer. Conquering other cities has a huge impact on the health costs, and it will only stabilize when the citizens begin to settle down in their new reign.

For this reason, you should always have a good supply of health before you decide to invade enemy territories. In addition to invasion, higher difficulties also tend to become stricter with supply and usage of health.

You will start with a lower supply of health on high difficulties, and the cost for the cities is on larger, while production of health from buildings and improvements is lower.

Increasing your Health
Health isn’t a locked stat – it can and should be increased as much as possible. You should have at least one or two buildings with Health bonuses in every city to stabilize your colony’s total health.

Additionally, Prosperity virtues grant a huge amount of health, and you can also get health from certain wonders. There will normally be scenarios in which you will find your health dipping into negative values.

This is fine as long as you can fix it quickly enough. However, you should never let your health stay in a negative value for too long, or else the penalties will accumulate to have a drastic impact on your nation’s progress.

Similarly, you should try to find a balance and never overcommit in generating health – too much health will be a waste of resources, as there are no added bonuses when your health goes above 20.

Keep it near this value at all times, and only generate a bit more when you are about to establish outposts or conquer other lands.

Energy

While health may be the limiting factor for your growth and prosperity, Energy is essentially the money of the modern era.

The construction and maintenance of almost anything and everything in Civilization: Beyond Earth requires Energy, which is why you should try to maintain a large supply at all times. Thankfully, unlike Health there are many more options to accumulate Energy.

Tile improvements like generators and energy producing buildings, trade routes, and working on water-based tiles are just a few of many ways to generate Energy.

You can also get energy from unconventional methods like finding resource pods, pillaging enemy tiles, destroying alien nests, and diplomacy with neighbors.

Energy will be your primary resource when you are training and constructing buildings in strong economies, but weak economies can be dangerous in this regard as they will require much more.

For this reason, you should always prioritize improving Energy yields on your tiles and prioritize economic buildings in cities with weak economies.

The upkeep of all your major buildings, transports, trade routes, and maintenance consumes Energy.

To get a clear idea of your current Energy generation and consumption, highlight the golden Energy icon at the top of the screen to see where you’re Energy is going, and where you are getting your income from.

Balancing your Energy
If your budget starts to fail, your upkeep starts being funded by your Science instead of Energy. This is a death scenario and will send your nation crashing down.

In such cases, you need to prioritize economic buildings and attempt to trade routes and city connections. Conversely, having too much Energy can also be a bad thing.

You want to make sure that your money is being spent – Energy that is not being invested into anything and just staying in ‘reserves’ is basically useless to you.

For this reason, you shouldn’t try to over-stack yourself with Energy. Instead, keep a small amount of reserve, enough for emergency purposes, but ensure that a major portion of your Energy production is being utilized by buildings, training, and other facilities.

If you are going into war time, you will need to invest your Energy into defenses and building units. This is a scenario in which your reserves would do good, and the exact time when you should prioritize your Production and Energy.